TOKEN2049

Role:
Design Lead

Focus:
Product design, brand consistency, stakeholder alignment, fast execution

Format:
Large-scale international conferences & digital platforms

Context

TOKEN2049 is a global Web3 conference platform, best known for its flagship events bringing together founders, investors, builders, and institutions across multiple regions.

Design at TOKEN2049 operates in a high-speed, high-visibility environment, where product, brand, and event execution intersect. The challenge is not just designing interfaces, but ensuring clarity, consistency, and quality across products, marketing surfaces, and on-site experiences, often under extreme time pressure.

Main stage.

The challenge

The TOKEN2049 ecosystem is complex and constantly evolving:

Multiple products and surfaces (website, apps, content, on-site experiences).
Diverse stakeholders across marketing, production, partnerships, and leadership.
Tight timelines driven by fixed event dates.
High expectations from sponsors, speakers, and a global audience.

The core challenge is: How do we maintain a high-quality, consistent design standard across products and experiences while moving at the speed required by a global events business?

1500 drones creating the TOKEN2049 Dubai logo.

My role and responsibilities

I worked as a Design Lead, balancing hands-on execution with leadership, alignment, and quality control. My responsibilities included:

Leading product and experience design across key TOKEN2049 surfaces.
Acting as a design quality owner, ensuring consistency across brand, product, and event-related outputs.
Translating business, marketing, and stakeholder needs into clear design direction.
Collaborating closely with product, marketing, and engineering teams.
Supporting and mentoring designers, improving both output quality and team velocity.
Making fast, pragmatic design decisions under tight deadlines

The role required constant prioritization - knowing when to go deep and when to optimize for speed without sacrificing clarity.

Sneak peak of the brand mastersheet.

Outcome

Improved design consistency across product and event touchpoints.
Faster execution through clearer alignment and decision-making.
Reduced friction between stakeholders, design, and delivery teams.
A more reliable and scalable design approach for recurring global events.

The result was a polished, coherent experience across the TOKEN2049 ecosystem, supporting both business goals and brand credibility at scale.

Badges, lanyards and merch study.

Reflection

Working at TOKEN2049 reinforced that senior design leadership in fast-moving organizations is about:

Creating clarity in complex systems.
Protecting quality while embracing speed.
Making confident decisions with imperfect information.
Enabling teams to execute without constant supervision.

In environments like TOKEN2049, the value of a senior designer is not just the pixels - it’s the ability to keep the system working when everything is moving fast.

More info at www.token2049.com